Awesome
node-symlink-or-copy
Symlink a file or directory to another place. Fall back to copying on Windows. Made for use with Broccoli plugins, for "do what I mean" behavior.
Installation
npm install --save symlink-or-copy
Example
const symlinkOrCopySync = require('symlink-or-copy').sync;
symlinkOrCopySync('src_dir/some_file.txt', 'dest_dir/some_file.txt');
symlinkOrCopySync('src_dir/some_dir', 'dest_dir/some_dir');
Description
symlinkOrCopySync(srcPath, destPath);
Create a symlink at destPath
pointing to srcPath
.
On Windows, we may fall back to copying srcPath
to destPath
, preserving
last-modified times. However, do not rely on always getting a copy on
Windows (see Notes below).
If you pass a relative srcPath
, it will be resolved relative to
process.cwd()
, akin to a copy function. Note that this is unlike
fs.symlinkSync
,
whose srcPath
is relative to destPath
.
If srcPath
does not exist or is a broken symlink, we might throw an
exception, or we might create a broken symlink.
When we fall back to copying, symlinks at or beneath srcPath
will be
dereferenced, and broken symlinks will cause exceptions.
We will throw an exception if destPath
already exists. Thus in contrast to
Unix cp
or ln
, the following will fail:
// dest_dir already exists, and we might expect dest_dir/some_dir to be
// created. This does not work; pass 'dest_dir/some_dir' instead.
symlinkOrCopySync('src_dir/some_dir', 'dest_dir');
It is an error if the parent directory of destPath
does not already exist.
When we symlink, if the file at srcPath
is a symlink as well, it will be
dereferenced before symlinking, to avoid runaway symlink indirection.
Notes
-
Symlinks technically work on Windows, but they require special rights. For users with those rights, symlinks are used, but when not available, a combination of junctions and copying is used to mimic the behavior somewhat performantly.
-
There intentionally isn't an asynchronous version. It's not clear that we need or want one. Before sending a patch to add an async version, please share your use case on the issue tracker.